The drop-shuttle was an ancient piece of shit with heat shielding so thin that Scab actually started sweating. His sweat, less toxic after the internal purge, still made smoking rivulets through his make-up.
The sun looked pale, distant and weak through the haze of pollution. Planetfall found them on one of Cascade’s surface stations close to the Great Rift. The surface station’s landing areas were above the foul-smelling, turgid gunk of the planet’s all-encompassing ocean, so they took elevators down below the water, their internal systems compensating for pressure changes.
They actually had to walk to the carbon reservoirs in the laser-cut caves below the ocean. They transferred debt relief with their fake ID signatures to the AI system running the reservoirs and plugged in the portable assemblers. The custom templates began growing the bikes.
With the planet’s resources dwindling, much of its population was itinerant and followed the mining work. They were cheaper to employ than automatons. With air travel restricted, mostly by wealth, and the oceans so polluted as to make water-travel difficult, the vast road network beneath the ocean was the quickest, cheapest and – more importantly to Vic, Scab and the Alchemist – the most anonymous way to travel.
The bodyglove bikes were long, low motorcycles with powerful internal gyroscopes, powered by miniature fusion reactors. Moulded to the rider or riders’ shape, the armoured body slid over to completely enclose the rider.
‘Ground transport is so primitive,’ Steve muttered. Vic and Scab nodded.
Scab climbed into his bike, lying face down as the padding encased him. He wrapped his fingers around the backup manual control bars even as his neunonics established connection with the vehicle. The armour slid over him and locked into place. Scab’s omnipresent P-sat, configured to look like a black sphere at the moment, sank into a port on top of the bike. Its AG motor could help with certain manoeuvres, and the P-sat’s lasers would be the bike’s only legal offensive weaponry.
Vic’s bike was obviously larger. It had three in-line wheels, two at the back, one at the front. Vic lay face down, information from the bike’s systems appearing in his vision as he established a neunonic connection. Steve stood over the bike, staring at it.
‘I’m pretty much going to have to lie on you,’ Steve complained. ‘Also, I think this stupid body gets motion sickness.’
‘We’re here because of you,’ Vic told the dolphin irritably. There were easier ways to do what they were trying to do, but as ever, Scab had a plan. ‘Climb on, don’t throw up on me and absolutely don’t soil yourself, do you understand?’ Vic told him. Steve nodded and climbed on top of the ’sect. The padding configured itself around them and the armour slid shut. They sent their information to Cascade traffic control, reversed out of the carbon reservoir cave and headed for the on-ramp.
They were doing two hundred miles an hour by the time they hit the road. To Vic it looked less like a road and more like a vast plain. Formerly seabed, it had been flattened and then covered with a molecularly bonded hardened concrete analogue. As far as the bike’s three-hundred-and-sixty-degree sensor feed could see, lanes of traffic stretched out in all directions. The vast plain was interspersed with huge pillars with tunnels running through them to allow the passage of traffic. The pillars held up the ceiling covering the road system. The ceiling looked black but was actually transparent – the blackness was the sea above the road. Built during the joyous optimism of the mid-Colonial era, the grand engineering project designed to encourage tourism was now little more than a white elephant – and an accident waiting to happen. Vic decided to release a gentle relaxant. The road system was managing to make him feel both agoraphobic – he grew up in the confines of hive habitats – and claustrophobic at the same time.
They filtered through the busy traffic at speed, weaving between the other vehicles. For the bigger bulk-haulers or moving dormitory blocks, they simply joined the traffic speeding under them. Traffic authority and police contractors patrolled the gap between the road and the ceiling in G-carriers and hoppers.
‘I still don’t get the plan,’ Vic said over an occulted ’face link as they wove in and out of the wheels of a huge mobile leisure complex. He could see smaller shuttle vehicles driving up the large vehicle’s ramps into its parking bays. The shuttle vehicles would probably have come from larger domicile vehicles slaved to follow the mobile leisure complex.
‘Please slow down,’ Steve said. He did not sound happy. ‘And can’t you just drive in a straight line?’
‘We’re going to find Steve a new body,’ Scab’s reply came back.
‘I get that. I even get why we’re doing it this way,’ though it feels like a long shot to me, Vic decided to not add. ‘I mean overall. All right, we’ve got the most valuable commodity in Known Space, and yes, we’re actually in credit as a result of this, but how is any of that helping? Rich as we are, we can’t settle down anywhere, and we’re still no closer to cashing in on Talia.’ Not that Vic wanted to cash in on her. ‘All we’re doing is collecting strange people and strange things for no good reason that I can see. Have we got an exit plan?’
There was no answer for a long time and Vic gradually came to the conclusion that Scab wasn’t going to reply. He was wondering if the business with Scab’s clone was stopping his human partner/captor from thinking clearly. Or what passed for thinking clearly in Scab’s world, anyway.
‘The plan hasn’t changed. We’re auctioning Talia,’ Scab eventually said across the occulted ’face link.
‘Then why are we pandering to a chemist who’s going to make us potent hallucinogens?’ Vic asked as he swerved the bike around a cradled limousine with eight bubble wheels. The limo’s cab was tinted and his scans detected an active privacy field.
‘Key isn’t a hallucinogen,’ Scab said.
Vic tried to shake his head, aping a human gesture he’d observed, but the contours of the bodyglove’s internal padding held him still. Well, that explains everything, then, the insect thought. The bike’s three wheels inflated, becoming ball wheels, as they approached the Great Rift and they began receiving advisements on their speed from the Cascade Traffic Authority. Vic engaged the bike’s magnetic locks, adhering the bike to the road, which looked as if it came to an end right in front of them. Vehicles disappeared over the edge, cabs and cargo bays swinging in their cradles to remain level, accompanied by a thundering noise that not even the filters on their augmented hearing could completely dampen.
They went over the edge into a canyon more than five miles deep. Multiple lanes ran up and down the Great Rift Road, and they saw more than a few vehicles come unstuck when their magnetic locks failed, some bouncing off other vehicles as they fell. Subjectively above the vertically travelling bikes, the ocean had become a vast, black, horribly polluted waterfall.
There was a jarring crash as a sliding vehicle, its magnetic locks having only partially failed, slid into the rear of Vic’s bodyglove. As the bike slewed around, the ball wheels compensated by changing direction through the skid. Then they were travelling horizontally down the rift wall. The cradle on the small cargo vehicle that hit them hadn’t moved when it went over the edge and its cargo tumbled down into the rift. The vehicle itself was hanging on by one wheel now. Through the bodyglove’s sensor feed, Vic could see the lizard driver’s terrified expression. Vic ’faced the vehicle and, finding its electronic defences to be rudimentary, he sent an override signal to the remaining working magnetic lock. The cargo vehicle fell off the road, to be pushed away by a safety feature that used the road’s magnetic field to repulse debris. It would cause less chaos in the long run, Vic decided. Then Steve vomited on his back.
They took an off-ramp that led them behind the transparent, vertical road where a series of terraces containing towns and buildings had been cut out of the solid rock. Here the roadways were either horizontal on the terraces or diagonal ramps connecting level to level.
They found the place Scab was looking for about four miles down, a seedy apartment warren cut out of the rift wall. They parked the bikes as close to their destination as they could get, leaving their P-sats to guard the vehicles after initiating all the legal defensive systems they’d been allowed to equip the bikes with.
The shop was on one of the balconies facing the underside of the road. The continental-plate-sized waterfall looked like a solid wall of black, and only the noise told them it was moving. Even with audio dampeners they had to shout to be heard. ’Facing was an easier way of communicating, except that Steve, along with his hygiene strike, had refused to accept neunonics until he’d been given a dolphin body. The stench from the waterfall was also appalling to the point of dangerous, and their nano-screens had sent a number of toxic warnings to their neunonics. They had to force an upgraded portable nano-screen on Steve. Even so, the chemist looked decidedly ill.
Vic was still trying to wipe the vomit off as they approached the shop. The shopfront was a mixture of solid rock and armoured shutters covered in graffiti. Some of the graffiti was holographic, some cut into the stone with lasers. The blinking holographic sign was actually written in script, rather than showing an animation of the services the business proffered.
A strobe gun mounted on a mechanical arm appeared out of the wall to cover them when they ’faced to gain entrance. Scab kept ’facing debt relief until the heavily armoured door popped inwards and then slid open. They found themselves in an airlock covered by another strobe gun. They were extensively scanned. When the security systems attempted to take blood and DNA samples, Scab just ’faced more debt relief until they were allowed in. He paid enough that they didn’t have to relinquish any weapons, either.
The inner airlock door popped inwards and slid open.
‘There are much cheaper ways to get to see me,’ a heavily accented voice said.
Scab stepped out of the airlock, followed by Vic and Steve. Inside, it was very humid. They were standing on a catwalk connected to a series of walkways over a number of protein vats that Vic assumed would be used for growing various soft-tech augments and replacements. Embedded in the wall were a number of clone tanks filled with a murky green and yellow fluid. Just over three-quarters of them contained shapes consistent with variants of the four uplifted races.
‘No, no, no, I don’t think so,’ the Alchemist said, looking around.
‘Shut up,’ Scab told him.
Vic glanced up. The ceiling was a distant shadow, and the premises had obviously been expanded to subsume other apartments and commercial premises within the warren complex. The skeletal remnants of other rooms were still visible. More clone tanks had been embedded into the walls high above them, and strung between old supports, spars of rock, the walls and the actual ceiling was a network of heavy-gauge, weblike cables.
The cables moved as something slowly but agilely made its way towards them. Vic suppressed an instinctive feeling of revulsion. At first the shape made him think it was a distasteful hard-tech arachnid augment for a ’sect. But as it came closer, he saw that the eight-legged form was a mostly soft-tech augment coupled with a base human. The human arachnid was wearing some sort of smock and a hat. His eyes were the compound eyes of a spider but the lids had epicanthic folds. He had a tiny pointed goatee and a long wispy moustache. Each of his multi-jointed limbs ended in a further eight digits that could manipulate as fingers or thumbs, and each digit ended in some sort of tool or surgical device.
‘I don’t like going anywhere unarmed, and I don’t like explaining myself,’ Scab said.
‘Careful,’ Vic ’faced Scab. ‘He doesn’t know who you are, doesn’t know your rep, so to him you’re just another dick.’ Vic was conscious of the stealthed arachnid automaton hiding high up in the net. More conspicuous were the three strobe guns on spipods moving around in the web. Vic liked the approach. One spipod for each customer and a stealthed surprise that probably would have fooled his sensors before they had become rich enough to significantly upgrade them.
Scab looked up at Vic. Scab was still wearing a suit, hat and raincoat, but the ensemble was less unpleasantly garish than his usual efforts and much more like the suits ‘normal’ people would wear.
‘You’re Jonas,’ Scab said, turning back to the cloner and soft-tech purveyor. The human arachnid nodded. ‘We have a job for you. We need a dolphin with very specific specs and soft-tech augments. We’ll also need neunonics, again to the spec we designate, a P-sat equipped with manipulators and one or two other things. We know your ability and your stock, and everything we’re asking for is well within your capabilities. We will pay you well for your services. We also need it done very quickly and very discreetly, for which we will also pay handsomely.’
Scab ’faced over the instructions, and then both he and Vic concentrated for a moment as they received feed from the bikes. The bodygloves’ countermeasures and their P-sats were dealing with people trying to tamper with them.
‘Hmm,’ Jonas said in a manner that Vic felt was supposed to be inscrutable. He suspected the clone-technician was running some kind of personality created from a pre-Loss human racial stereotype. ‘A dolphin? They are restricted. Mainly for Church use—’
‘I’ve told you, we know what you can do, and what you’ve done before, and we’ll pay you more than enough for your services to avoid the inevitable negotiations, because, frankly, they annoy me.’
‘They’re not for “Church use”,’ Steve said in exasperation. ‘They work with the Church.’
‘This is our friend Steve,’ Vic said cheerfully. Steve glared at Vic but didn’t correct the ’sect.
Jonas was looking at Steve with interest. Vic was pretty sure the cloner had worked out that the apparent human was actually a dolphin. This meant a Church connection, and nobody liked dealing with the Church, particularly as nearly all dolphins worked with bridge drives.
‘This will be very expensive,’ Jonas mused.
‘Here’s half the debt relief now,’ Scab said.
So much for inscrutable, Vic thought when Jonas rocked back in his web after checking the sum he’d just received.
‘I will have to source the P-sat and the hard-tech augments elsewhere. I will use discreet people I trust, pay them a lot of your money and order everything as separate components and templates to assemble here, if that is all right with you?’ Scab nodded. ‘And is there anything else I can get you, Mr …’
Scab just shook his head, then reached into the breast pocket of his suit and drew out his cigarette case.
‘Look, Scab—’ Steve started. Too late he realised his mistake. Vic and Scab both turned to stare at him. Jonas froze on his web. Scab put a cigarette into his mouth and lit the inhalable poison as Jonas scuttled around in his web to face Scab. The human killer put the case back into his breast pocket, and suddenly his tumbler pistol was in his hand. The spipod-mounted strobe guns moved to cover Scab but stopped abruptly, presumably the result of an order from Jonas who would not be eager to antagonise someone with Woodbine Scab’s reputation. The stealthed arachnid automaton high above remained still.
‘I don’t care,’ Jonas said. ‘I’m very greedy, and you’re paying me enough not to care.’
Scab just nodded.
They became so tired of Steve’s whining and trying to tell Jonas how to do his job that they sedated him. His new body was being speed-grown in one of the vats, the augments had already been spliced into it and his neunonics had crawled into the meat of the dolphin body’s brain to better adapt to it as it grew.
They had no interest in preserving the human body, so Jonas had used an invasive nanite procedure to download and then imprint Steve’s mind into the new body. All of which had taken the better part of a human-standard twenty-six-hour day.
Scab had spent most of that time almost completely still, crouched on the side of a catwalk near the edge of one of the
vats. He had been chain smoking, and hadn’t reholstered his tumbler pistol.
Vic had also crouched down, but only because it was a comfortable resting pose for his hard-tech-augmented body. Jonas scuttled backwards and forwards, checking on things. There was no doubt in Vic’s mind that the arachnid human – or spider monkey, as Vic had started thinking of him – was more than a little nervous of Scab’s presence. Scab had been allowed limited neunonic access to the cloner’s systems so he could monitor what was happening. A number of items, including the components of the customised P-sat, had been delivered, but they’d all been left in the airlock.
Finally Steve’s new P-sat rose into the air.
‘Get me out of this filth,’ Steve said. ‘I need to be hosed down and put in the pool.’
Scab didn’t acknowledge the P-sat communication. Vic assumed his partner/captor was starting to think their plan hadn’t worked.
‘Now you pay me and leave?’ Jonas said. Scab turned to look at him. ‘Please?’ Jonas’s voice sounded calm, but the calmness had a narcotic quality to it.
Scab stood up. ‘What did you do?’ Scab asked.
‘Nothing,’ Jonas said, but fear was starting to break through the cloner’s drug-induced calm. The spider monkey swallowed hard and added some more drugs to his very nervous system, Vic suspected.
‘Guys?’ Steve asked. ‘Seriously, how are you going to get me back to the ship on a motorbike?’
A Quantum Mythology Page 55